Customer Reviews

The Vietnamese Gulag

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In 1943, two years before his birth in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, Toai's father and older brother joined the Vietminh, the communist underground movement in Vietnam. Toai became a National Liberation Front (NLF, Viet Cong) supporter as a high school student and rose to be an important student leader in the Saigon University during the late 1960's. He published a student magazine Tu Quet, (Self Determinination) and unswervingly followed the Viet Cong's highly-attractive propaganda line, "Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, and Social Welfare."

Toai never formally joined the Viet Cong, but, for nationalistic and idealistic reasons, he served it superbly. He led takeovers of the Vietnamese National Assembly and the Cambodian Embassy in Saigon, and lectured at Berkley to American anti-war activists (who thought his views too tame). After the North Vietnamese Army imposed peace in 1975, he became a senior official of the Ministry of Finance under the Provisional Government. He soon disagreed on purely professional grounds with a superior official and was quickly and unceremoniously tossed into jail.

Toai had previously read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and dismissed its substance as propaganda. When arrested, he vividly recalled Gulag's chapter 2, entitled "Arrest," in which the freshly arrested victim invariably thinks, "Who me? What for? It's a mistake, they'll clear it up." Toai consoled himself that the Gulag was in "old" Russia, and that he was in the "new" Vietnam. It turned out that there was no significant difference. He lived through two and a half years of horrors that may seem unbelievable to those who have not read Solzhenitsyn's works.

Toai was never charged with any offense, and was thus jailed for no reason at all. His wife, a French citizen, managed to return to France and from there won his freedom. As he was being released, the fact that there was no official reason whatever for either his arrest or his release caused bureaucratic gyrations that would have been hilarious had the issue been less serious.

During much of his time in prison, Toai was befriended by Nguyen Van Hien, an old and often-jailed Vietminh cadre from before the time that Ho Chi Minh left the Soviet Comintern and returned to Vietnam. Hien asked Toai to recall the NLF's program, a shining beacon - promulgate all democratic freedoms, amnesty to all political detainees, abolish all concentration camps, and strictly ban all illegal arrests and imprisonments. "What do you make of all that now," asked Hien, and his expression suggested, "We've all been taken in...Look around you stupid, what do you see?"

Incredibly, despite his sufferings and disillusionment, Hien remained a loyal communist. Like uncountable thousands of other idealists before him, he still grasped his lifelong ideal although he probably understood that he had been purged purely because he knew too much. "I've never eaten chocolate," he said. "I'll probably never know what it tastes like."

Toai eventually spoke again to former anti-Vietnam war activists in the U.S., thinking that he had something important to tell them. He was wrong. Most of them didn't want to listen.

(Published in a local newsletter in 1987.)

This is a well written book, very compelling story, but that title does not do justice to the story. This book is no more about the gulags of Vietnam than it is about the cu chi tunnels of the Mekong delta.

The story is a case of mistaken identity; Mr. Toai is mistaken for another Ngo Vuong Toai and apprehended by the communist authorities as they swept thru Ho Chi Minh City after reunification in 1975. As a result of this mistake, Toai is witness to the brutality of the prison system and the indifference of the communist cadre.

He has a very captivating narration style which is refreshing in the prison gulag genre. This is not the ivan denisovich day by day account of prison life. Toai cleverly weaves his whole entire biography into the story to illustrate the various stages in the takeover of south Vietnam in the post reunification period.

The problem is that Toai is incarcerated in couple of Prisons in Ho Chi Minh City and at no point does he go to the actual gulag. His observations are limited to accounting some new arrivals that had come from the reeducation camps, the Vietnamese euphemism for work camps where prisoners are worked to death.

The book doesn't even go into any detail about these prisoners returning from the gulag. There is scant mention of the camps, no details on their names and locations, and does not go into vast network of work camps and new economic zones.

What is most fascinating about this book is the portion where Toai recounts his visit to California in the late 60s. Toai was semi famous in the student movement groups as an agitator against the South Vietnamese Regime. However, personally he was not communist, or anti-communist, but a real nationalist.

His disillusion upon meeting the American student organizers in Berkeley was very intriguing. The students were blindly pro communist, and were disappointed that Toai was not more virulent in his support of communism.

This book is a great way to learn about the history of Vietnam in the post reunification period. A period of time that does not get much attention as the American social conscious evaporated out when our military involvement stopped.

I've read alot about the American Vietnam Era, but always by Americans, about the Americans. Doan Van Toai's tale of his student protest days and subsequent imprisonment is fascinating. It's extremely interesting to read about what was going on with the "other side" by someone who lived it. Toai was not in the military, no battles are described. It has to do with Vietnam Era from his civilian viewpoint. Easily makes my Top Ten of All Time book list.